[The greatest trial we endure]
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☞The greatest trial we endure in looking over our exchanges, is to find the New York Tribune1 grumbling and growling day after day, in sore apprehension lest enough will not be said on the Kansas question2. We are well satisfied that more has been said already on that same question, than any man would undertake to read for five thousand dollars; and that not one half as much has been written about the siege of Troy or the destruction of Gomorrah. Yet the Tribune—which has itself devoted from three to twelve columns daily to the subject for the last two years—is in mortal fear lest a few more last words should not be uttered. Its eulogium on Senator Seward’s3 eight-column speech the other day was qualified by the regret that the Senator did not “go more fully into the subject.” And now it “hopes that the report of the Kansas Commission of the last Congress, may be read. Those 1,300 pages might be judiciously inserted in some speech.” Well will it be for Kansas, if she grows as many ears of corn annually as there have been words uttered concerning her.—The odious garrulity and locquaciousness of public men, which the Tribune so constantly labors to encourage, is responsible for five-sixths of the delays of our Courts, the abuses of our legislative bodies, and the absurdities of our public gatherings. Our Senators have no time to concoct statesmanlike and far-seeing measures of legislation, while they are expected every few days to discharge a speech which would fill an octavo volume against the opposite party. No one benefits by the cacoethes loquendi4 which pervades Congress, except the printer of the Congressional Globe, who is said to receive $200,000 a year for recording the interminable harangues of the members of both houses.
Notes:
1. Horace Greeley's Tribune (founded in 1841) was a reform-minded New York newspaper that quickly became the most widely read papers in the country. For more information, see Susan Belasco, "The New York Daily Tribune," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
2. The "Kansas question" refers to whether Kansas would enter the union as a free or slave state. [back]
3. William H. Seward (1801–1872) served as a New York State senator in 1830, and U.S. senator in 1849. He would run, unsuccessfully, for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 and instead became Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869 under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson. Whitman would clerk for Seward during the Civil War, a job he obtained with the help of a recommendation letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson. [back]
4. "cacoethes loquendi" is a Latin phrase, meaning "an itch for writing." [back]